tell me about aro spec princess bubblegum pls pls pls pls !!!!
Okay, so I know I've rambled about this in a reblog of some post from AGES ago, and I'm being so genuine when I say I'm VERY charmed you saw me say "ask me about aro spec princess bubblegum" and you DID, regardless of how long ago it was from, that my tumblr blog says "mostly a 'Hazbin Hotel' blog now" in the header you presumably saw to send me an ask, and that my pinned post is me asking for asks on AOTM ("Anguish of the Marrow", a Hazbin Hotel fic that has eaten my entire brain over the past month and a half or so). Amazing. Autistic aros will be like "is anyone gonna activate this unskippable cut scene?" with each other and not wait for an answer. <3 Anyway, I think an alloromantic lesbian reading of Princess Bubblegum's rejections of her male suitors is valid, especially given the homophobia of Cartoon Network (CN) and how they pushed back against Bubbline. Her lack of interest in male suitors might have been the closest to alloromantic lesbian-coding CN allowed the writers to get away with for years. I don't want to deny alloromantic lesbians that.
Now, with that said, I personally enjoy reading that as arospec. She never says she's not interested in men specifically or gives any indication at all that it's not men specifically she's interested in, and she never gives any indication that she might be more open to dating women in general. She doesn't even really give the "I'm busy" response to her suitors. She just says she's not interested in them. Her breakdown to Ricardio of "What you're feeling isn't love, it's infatuation" is SO "autistic arospec who is Tired of this" to me. Speaking Watsonianly, Princess Bubblegum is the princess of the Candy Kingdom: if she was an alloromantic lesbian, she could probably communicate that, have her subjects go "oh, OK" and instead have an eager line of women suitors at her door instead. Sure, Ice King might be gross about it when the crown is being particularly aggressive in its affects on his mind, Ricardio might not care, but in general, I can pretty easily imagine Bubblegum communicating she's an alloromantic lesbian if she wanted to have a bunch of women trying to date her. The thing is, she doesn't. All she does is tell these suitors over and over that she's not interested. Again, I want to recognize that CN might not have allowed her to express any interest in women or make a note of it being men specifically, but to me, it reads like that aro thing of "I said no and I shouldn't have to explain more. I said no." Hell, she never gives Finn, a guy who would probably respect "I'm a lesbian" for an answer, that answer. She just expresses polite disinterest over and over. Arospec as hell to me.
Princess Bubblegum only ever expresses romantic interest in Marceline. Even when that was going canon, there was no reference to past ex girlfriends, no reference to her being an alloromantic lesbian or alloromantically bi or otherwise alloromantically sapphic. This isn't part of any build up or hinting that she might be interested in Marceline. It's all focused on her relationship with Marceline specifically. As a grayro who only ever got a crush on her then best friend, it feels like that to me personally.
Peebles is also delightful grayro rep to me personally because while in some ways she might be criticized as an arospec stereotype: she's got that logic autism that means she has to understand the science of it to use her candy powers; she can come off as clinical/impersonal (see her rejection of Ricardio); and she can be EXTREMELY ruthless in achieving her aims (see her genocide of the Rattleballs for becoming too intelligent and therefore a threat to her power, see her manipulation of Flame Princess into allowing her into the Fire Kingdom with her good will, taking advantage of Flame Princess's inexperience governing and that good will, and then destroying the Fire Kingdom's defense system while they're in the missile chamber and when Flame Princess horrifiedly asks why she did that, she trusted her, Princess Bubblegum just shrugs and says "Sorry, Phoebe. I gotta protect my peeps" and that's that.) When she couldn't control the sphinxes she created, she was like well, guess we gotta kill 'em and Finn and Jake are like we're not killing them because you messed up and also they didn't happen to be the creature you wanted??? Hello??? She's so unmoved by the whole thing. The sphinxes were an unconscionable threat to the Candy Kingdom's safety (in her view), therefore they must be destroyed, and she shall send her best knights (Finn and Jake) who also happen to be right there to do it. Stop looking at her like that; it's the logical thing to do! What, a woman can't stay awake for days on end to create life in a lab and then destroy it when it doesn't turn out quite like how she wanted? Golb forbid women do anything :/
(Fuck, that's also a pattern for her given the Lemongrabs. One of her creations said "unmake me" and she went damn I guess I gotta keep trying to make new life. Also, again, see the Rattleball genocide. And on the note of the Lemongrabs, the whole episode where she sends the Lemongrabs the seeds to grow new food but they keep creating new sapient life forms and the Lemongrab Kingdom is starving is just absolutely fucking horrific and I could write so much about that just like I could write so much about the geopolitics at play between Princess Bubblegum and Flame Princess, holy shit. But this isn't about that, or at least, isn't what you asked for. Unfortunately for you, one of my special interests is politics! I'm having fun.) But-- BUT-- despite all of those things, Bubblegum is a pleasant person. Yes, she can be reserved and impersonal, particularly when she just... doesn't want to bother with being warm (again, see her rejection of Ricardio in particular, as well as Finn and male suitors in general), but she is not the absolutely unfeeling evil aro-coded villain trope, and nor is her crush on Marceline a particularly "humanizing" thing about her. We know Princess Bubblegum isn't an "emotional neuter" (to borrow language from AOTM) because we see how passionate she gets when she creates. She gets sleepy and starts slurring her words. She gets annoyed with Finn. When she was a little girl she was so lonely she created an entire family out of gum to be her family, and was kind of horrified that they were cruel people who had no interest in her other than taking advantage of her (Peebles has really funky lines about what behavior she finds morally permissible. The interpersonal callousness of her created "family" is confusing to her because she's done nothing but be genuine to them and poses no threat to them, so why do they only treat her poorly? Why did they come out so mean when all she wanted was other people to hang out with? Meanwhile, her genocide of the Rattleballs is completely justified in her mind because they posed a threat to the Candy Kingdom to her-- oh, did you say she's conflating that with a threat to her power? She is the state. Monarchies are not democracies. She's not being self-centered and unconscionably, horrifically violent; she's being perfectly reasonable! Her dismantling of the Fire Kingdom's defenses is unfortunate to her, I can believe, but that's just geopolitics in her mind. She has a responsibility to protect her people more than she has a responsibility to be "good" to Flame Princess. Oh, she's left them open to attack from other kingdoms? Yeah, that's just geopolitics for you, tough beans. She also surveils the Candy People horrifically while being righteously angry when Finn disrespects her privacy. Because Bubblegum is doing it to protect her people, in her mind, whereas Finn is just being a creep.)
(Yes, for those of you watching from my Hazbin followers, I did talk myself into realizing how similar she is to Alastor in terms of her morality there, don't worry, I see it. Yes, my type of blorbo is autistic arospecs with weird and compelling moral codes. I see it. Don't worry. I Am Aware.) Actually, if anything her, disinterest in dating outside of Marceline comes across as quite often "humanizing" to me. (Yes, @superkitten-poison, I am drawing on your analysis of Alastor's aromanticism being humanizing, to give credit where credit is due.) She is polite, if reserved, when she does it the first time, and it is only when she is well and truly pushed to that she can do the more calculated takedown with Ricardio, and it's only when he physically attacks her that she fights back. When Finn accuses her of being jealous now that he's dating Flame Princess when she tries to warn him about the possibility of their chemistry causing something of a natural disaster given Flame Princess's, you know, flame powers, she is so pissed off about it in a very "human" way, and a way that is very readable as arospec to me. (I'm largely setting aside the episode where she age regresses and she and Finn sort of date, because it's weird as hell to me, but only having a crush on Finn while magically age regressed and then it vanishing once again in addition to her crush on Marceline is still arospec! Two crushes over however long she's been alive is still very much arospec!)
Even the way she's the "logical" character who can't access her candy powers by "intuition" but has to understand the science of it is framed by the narrative as a completely legitimate way to be a person. Her Candy Elemental mentor is like "you can't do that!!! You're supposed to get in touch with your feelings, your true self, and access the Candy powers within you!!!" and Bubblegum just. Completely coolly. Says that she just did, she just made jellybeans fly from her hands for the first time and he saw that, how can he say that it's not working? Her true self is a person who needed scientifically understand how she's conjuring jellybeans from her hands. He wanted her to be true to her self? That's what that looks like for her even if that's not what it looked like for him or any other avatar of the element of candy. When he tries to impose his way of being onto her, she's basically like "get fucked" (but again, in that cool reserved way that she so often is and in a CN friendly way) and sends him back into the sands of time because he's not helping her. As someone who often takes issue with how characters like her are treated in fictional settings with magic, I really loved the subversion of the trope of the unbeliever. She's not disbelieving the magic right in front of her-- she just knows that "magic" is something scientific principles can be applied to, and that any complex enough technology can be indistinguishable from magic as in that which cannot be explained by science. There just isn't an explanation for it yet, and one of her very favorite things in the whole world is science. (And again! She can be a real dork about this! See her fixating on creating the sphinxes and not sleeping and eating for a few days, because, well, fucking mood, man.)
There's her "people get built different. We don't have to understand it, just respect it" moment with her brother Neddy, and her insistence of treating him like a being worthy of care-- I guess since she can care for him in the caverns of the Candy Kingdom and he's genuinely content in there, she doesn't feel a need to kill him because there was an easier way to deal with that threat-- she's not an ableist monster; she's practical! Actually, this isn't necessarily inconsistent with her genocide of the Rattleballs, because she didn't need to dehumanize them to kill them off. She saw them as people, just people who posed a threat to her order. There's no contradiction to her seeing Neddy as a person. There's also the fact they both come from the Mother Gum, and Princess Bubblegum might feel a special responsibility to him for that reason. Augh, you did not ask about this; I just haven't chewed on Princess Bubblegum's morality in a while and you caught me in my "chew on 'bad' arospec's fucked up moral codes" era. But again, anyway, she is not an unfeeling monster; she cares about Neddy and she cares about Finn and Jake treating him well and with respect.
There's her "all my jokes are cries for help" line with Finn where here eye twitches and she's holding a shotgun. This is not an unfeeling character. Growing up watching Adventure Time and aging with the show, it's the moment you (read: I) realize(d) that she's not that immaculately put together cool woman you think has her life all together and can't be phased by anything. She has her breaking points. When the gum "family" is coming for everything she holds dear, her kingdom; her people as in the Candy people; threatening Finn, Jake, and Marceline (arguably her people in another sense of the term). She is just as capable of breaking down as you are. She never had a supportive family to model interpersonal relationships off of and the people she literally created to be her family are trying to kill her and her loved ones to take the kingdom she literally built from the ground up. As Marceline says in "Monster", "we were messed up kids who taught ourselves how to live" [emphasis mine]. She's not superhumanly put together: she's just as messy as anyone else. She is vulnerable there.
She gets a concussion and loses her usual eloquence.
ID: A screengrab from Adventure Time in which a roughed up Princess Bubblegum says to a haggard Marceline "Nothing's never happening to me. Never." Marceline responds "Girl, you phrased that so weird." End ID.
She's not just getting gooey in front of her crush; she immediately afterward says "I might have a concussion." Her relationship with Marceline is messy! They've been on and off for centuries. It's not magically transformative for being her only romance, and she's not preternaturally bad at it for it being her only romantic relationship either. It's just messy because they're two people who were in fact "messed up kids who taught [themselves] how to live" who keep learning over and over how to relate to each other. "You're self-obsessed and all the rest and PB I'm so over it" in "Woke Up" doesn't read to me as "cold unfeeling arospec" but "this autistic-coded, reasonably readable as arospec character who has a very put together image has flaws like anybody else" moment. PB's self-importance doesn't read as some fundamental inability to care about other people or feel feelings to me: it reads like a character flaw (or trait, if you want to get into it a la AOTM, which you quite likely do not, so I'll spare you). It reads as messy because they're "human"/people (they're not both technically human, hence the quotation marks, despite wanting to evoke the connotations of the word).
She's SO angry when she breaks down the door screaming "MONARCHIES! ARE NOT! DEMOCRACIES!" after the King of OOO wins the election, and yes, it's a VERY delightfully morally gray moment for her and the show, but that anger is very "human". In some ways, her coming off as an entitled brat IS very humanizing. It's not clinical cold calculating scheming in that moment; it's an angry entitled outburst that isn't flattering. For all of Princess Bubblegum's potentially being the evil arospec who is humanized by (romantic) love, she really, truly does not read that way to me. She reads like a complex autistic character with interesting morals who I like to read as having a rich grayromantic experience. I'd argue there's a very legitimate read that she DOES have Justice Autism, it's just that her ideas of what's "just" are different than most people's. Of course she's willing to do anything for her principles, are they even principles otherwise? (What do you mean committing genocide of the Rattleballs is "unprincipled"? Or that fucking over Flame Princess and her people like that was? Her "protect the security of the Candy Kingdom" principle was her top principle, is all.) She's complex, she's complicated, she's messy, and most importantly she's compelling. And she's grayromantic.
To me, anyway. Thank you for the ask; I tried to match the enthusiasm you conveyed in the ask and I apologize if I went overboard! I probably could have streamlined this, but oh well, I had fun.
